[nem-en] loving Nemerle

[Greg Fitzgerald]

Nemerle developers,

Since Nemerle version 0.2, I have been watching the growth of Nemerle,
but haven't had any side-projects big enough to justify setting Ruby
aside and start coding in Nemerle.

About a month ago, I one project finally got big enough that I got
sick of dealing with the subtle bugs that come up in interpreted
languages, and I wanted something that would run much faster.

A few thousand lines later, I just wanted to shoot you guys an email
and say how much I am enjoying coding in Nemerle.  At first I was a
bit turned off in how strict the compiler is, but as I got used to the
language and the type-inference, I now think the compiler is just
awesome.  Its strictness has saved me *so* much debugging time.  I
love how I can write a few hundred lines of code all at once, fight
the compiler a little, and then all of a sudden, everything just
works.  It's a big change from the world of interpreted languages.

As much as I love using Nemerle's functional libraries, I must say
that my favorite part of Nemerle is the excellent integration of
generics.  Using only Nemerle.Collections for my data structures, I
have yet to write a single line of code, outside of class interfaces,
where I had to explicitly tell the compiler the type.  Great job guys!

Looking back at my Ruby code, Nemerle turns out to be not much longer.
 Nemerle's closure syntax is a little heavier, Nemerle asks you to use
parentheses a bit too often, and Nemerle requires you declare
variables.  Other than those few little differences, I'm blown away
that I can even attempt to compare a rapid-prototyping, interpreted
language to a statically-typed, compiled language.

Great job, keep it up, and I very much look forward to trying out the
indentation-based syntax in a future release.  And are there plans to
infer types of private class methods?  (cuz i'll gladly test-drive
that too :)

Thanks,
Greg